The Food and Drug Administration has outlined plans in ending the country’s lifetime ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men.
On Tuesday they have released proposed guidelines for screening blood donors at increased risk of carrying HIV. According to many activists and medical groups this 32-year-old policy is not justified. The current blanket ban on donations from homosexual men would be replaced with a policy which bars donation from men who has been sexually active with another man in the last one year. The policy shift had been announced by Obama in December.
If it gets finalized then this policy would put U.S. in line with other countries such as Australia, the U.K. and Japan for enforcing this one-year deferral period on donations from sexually active homosexual men.
David Stacy, the group’s government affairs director said in a statement, “This policy prevents men from donating life-saving blood based solely on their sexual orientation rather than actual risk to the blood supply.”
Medical groups such as American Medical Association has stated previously that science no longer supports lifetime ban especially given the advances in HIV testing.
Each and every one of U.S. blood donations is screened for HIV, although there is an approximately 10-day window between initial infections and when the virus can be detected in the bloodstream. According to the estimation of American Red Cross, the risk of getting an HIV-positive blood donation is 1 in 1.5 million for U.S. patients and each year about 15.7 million blood donations are collected in the U.S.
The FDA concluded that based on data from Australia and other sources, moving to a one-year deferral period would not cooperate with the safety of the U.S. blood supply. The lifetime donation ban dates from the early years of the AIDS crisis and was originally proposed for protecting the blood supply from a disease that was not understood well enough.
The current blood donor questionnaire asks men if they have had sex with another man since 1977, the year when AIDs epidemic started and potential donors answering positively would be barred from donating blood. The new questionnaire that FDA has proposed would only ask men if they have had sexual intercourse with another man in the last one year. The FDA will be taking comments on the draft proposal for 60 days, before they start finalizing the guidelines.
